Why politicians should stop dismissing the importance of ideology

I’m having an identity crisis. I am one of a growing number of youngish people who are looking for political alternatives beyond the Westminster bubble. Russell Brand’s Newsnight performance struck a chord. We’re excited by grassroots democracy and collaborative decision-making. But what do we call ourselves? Left wing? No, left and right are over. Progressive? Too woolly. Democratic? Too general. The only term that seems to work is anti-neoliberalism. And that is a hideously inelegant label to rally around.

What does it even mean? Despite admirable attempts to define the term, by cultural theorists Jeremy Gilbert and Will Davies among others, it’s stubbornly hard to pin down. Is it a specific market-fundamentalist programme, or a diffuse set of strategies designed to protect elite power? Why don’t neoliberals themselves ever use the word? It’s also not clear to me whether neoliberalism favours centralised state power or whether this power is only designed to prepare individuals to fend for themselves. Amongst the general public, neoliberalism has little or no currency.

It’s not only those who I’ll call the new left that find themselves at a crossroads of political nomenclature. All the main parties have got their linguistic knickers in a twist, coming up with ever more mangled policy statements and slogans. "Hardworking Britain Better Off". "An economy that delivers for people who want to work hard and get on in life". And so on. Ed Miliband shrinks from uttering the words "labour" or "the left". David Cameron steers clear of terms such as "right wing" or "conservative". The only markets he associates himself with explicitly are in Portugal selling fish. As the conference party season and the long general election campaign loom into view, this impasse will become ever more apparent.

David Cameron’s announcement this week that domestic policies will now be "tested" for their "impact" on families was a clear illustration of how politics has been reduced to morality and "evidence". The bit that is missing is ideology.

According to the OED, ideology is "a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy". In a paper I’ve written for the New Economics Foundation (NEF), I ask the question: why is that so terrible? Why has ideology become so toxic? In a speech last month marking the 20th anniversary of his becoming Prime Minister, Tony Blair said the Third Way’s analysis of the world was "shaped by reality not ideology, not by delusional thoughts based on how we want the world to be", and warned Miliband to avoid "playing to the gallery of our ideological ghosts". Miliband denounces George Osborne’s cuts as "ideologically driven", as though it was the fact that they are ideological that’s the problem, rather than their direction of travel. Even Jon Cruddas – himself arguably the most "ideological" of Labour backbenchers – has cited Tory strategy on rail ownership as an illustration of their tendency to "put ideology before common sense".

The truism that ideology is a dinosaur, no longer relevant to a complex, pragmatic, supple new political culture, doesn’t explain the vehemence with which politicians and commentators reject it. The point is, ideology is not dead: it’s just buried.

It’s no accident that the consignment of ideology to the dustbin of history has coincided with the growing dominance of the right in Western politics over the last three decades. When Francis Fukuyama declared the end of ideological debate 25 years ago, he was a neocon. We should raise an eyebrow when Nigel Farage, who supports a flat tax and the abolition of worker rights, says right and left don’t exist any more. The "death of ideology" thesis is a highly ideological confidence trick designed to render the tools of democratic challenge obsolete.

Politics is broken, we are constantly told. Yes it is, but how? It’s true that politicians have become professionalised and "out of touch". But they are pursuing the wrong remedy, dismissing idealism as highfalutin and producing increasingly mangled impressions of the vernacular and the concrete: Cameron and Osborne posing in hard hats; Cameron tackling a bacon sandwich; all this down-to-earth talk of money in your pocket and food on the table. The "problem with politics" is identified as its tribal, confrontational style: politicians are told to stop fighting each other and "get on with the job".

Yet this common-sense, bipartisan technocracy, underpinned by a moralistic work-culture of duty and shame, is a kind of soft totalitarianism. It chimes too readily with the reduction of political choices to economic optimisation, with claims that the need to "make efficiencies" is an apolitical matter of fact. Anyone who suggests otherwise needs a "reality check". Populism is no cure for the professionalisation of politics: the demotic posturing of Farage and BoJo is determinedly right-wing ideology in anti-political disguise.

Meanwhile, to the left of Labour, there’s a danger that the click-your-own, grow-your-own revolution unwittingly mirrors the tendencies of its opponents. Grassroots and community action is hugely inspiring, but without coordination and a coherent ideology it’s difficult to scale it all up into a concerted, enduring alternative to austerity and – for the want of a better word – neoliberalism.

The new left is, like the Tea Party in the US, eschewing the big state in favour of single-issue, local and horizontalist forms of organisation. But the state not only provides a safety net: it’s the only theatre for political contestation we currently have.

New theatres may emerge, but what is clear to me is that we need ideas and idealism as well as processes and action. In a sense our problem is not too much politics, but not enough. It may be unfashionable in these crowdsourced times, but I’d like to see politicians give up trying to impersonate ordinary people, and embrace their role as leaders who set out their vision for the future. The recent explosion of interest in "framing" amongst NGOs and think tanks is a symptom of the glaring absence of blueprints and articulation. It’s time to get it all out on the table, to declare agendas and reclaim politics. But it may be that our existing language is irrevocably tainted and that, to borrow the title of NoViolet Bulawayo’s 2013 novel, We Need New Names.

Eliane Glaser is a writer, lecturer and broadcaster. She tweets @ElianeGlaser

The Brexit Beartraps, #2: Could dropping out of the open skies agreement cancel your holiday?

So what is it this time, eh? Brexit is going to wipe out every banana planet on the entire planet? Brexit will get the Last Night of the Proms cancelled? Brexit will bring about World War Three?

To be honest, I think we’re pretty well covered already on that last score, but no, this week it’s nothing so terrifying. It’s just that Brexit might get your holiday cancelled.

What are you blithering about now?

Well, only if you want to holiday in Europe, I suppose. If you’re going to Blackpool you’ll be fine. Or Pakistan, according to some people...

You’re making this up.

I’m honestly not, though we can’t entirely rule out the possibility somebody is. Last month Michael O’Leary, the Ryanair boss who attracts headlines the way certain other things attract flies, warned that, “There is a real prospect... that there are going to be no flights between the UK and Europe for a period of weeks, months beyond March 2019... We will be cancelling people’s holidays for summer of 2019.”

He’s just trying to block Brexit, the bloody saboteur.

Well, yes, he’s been quite explicit about that, and says we should just ignore the referendum result. Honestly, he’s so Remainiac he makes me look like Dan Hannan.

But he’s not wrong that there are issues: please fasten your seatbelt, and brace yourself for some turbulence.

Not so long ago, aviation was a very national sort of a business: many of the big airports were owned by nation states, and the airline industry was dominated by the state-backed national flag carriers (British Airways, Air France and so on). Since governments set airline regulations too, that meant those airlines were given all sorts of competitive advantages in their own country, and pretty much everyone faced barriers to entry in others.

The EU changed all that. Since 1994, the European Single Aviation Market (ESAM) has allowed free movement of people and cargo; established common rules over safety, security, the environment and so on; and ensured fair competition between European airlines. It also means that an AOC – an Air Operator Certificate, the bit of paper an airline needs to fly – from any European country would be enough to operate in all of them.

Do we really need all these acronyms?

No, alas, we need more of them. There’s also ECAA, the European Common Aviation Area – that’s the area ESAM covers; basically, ESAM is the aviation bit of the single market, and ECAA the aviation bit of the European Economic Area, or EEA. Then there’s ESAA, the European Aviation Safety Agency, which regulates, well, you can probably guess what it regulates to be honest.

All this may sound a bit dry-

It is.

-it is a bit dry, yes. But it’s also the thing that made it much easier to travel around Europe. It made the European aviation industry much more competitive, which is where the whole cheap flights thing came from.

In a speech last December, Andrew Haines, the boss of Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority said that, since 2000, the number of destinations served from UK airports has doubled; since 1993, fares have dropped by a third. Which is brilliant.

Brexit, though, means we’re probably going to have to pull out of these arrangements.

Stop talking Britain down.

Don’t tell me, tell Brexit secretary David Davis. To monitor and enforce all these international agreements, you need an international court system. That’s the European Court of Justice, which ministers have repeatedly made clear that we’re leaving.

So: last March, when Davis was asked by a select committee whether the open skies system would persist, he replied: “One would presume that would not apply to us” – although he promised he’d fight for a successor, which is very reassuring.

We can always holiday elsewhere.

Perhaps you can – O’Leary also claimed (I’m still not making this up) that a senior Brexit minister had told him that lost European airline traffic could be made up for through a bilateral agreement with Pakistan. Which seems a bit optimistic to me, but what do I know.

Intercontinental flights are still likely to be more difficult, though. Since 2007, flights between Europe and the US have operated under a separate open skies agreement, and leaving the EU means we’re we’re about to fall out of that, too.

Surely we’ll just revert to whatever rules there were before.

Apparently not. Airlines for America – a trade body for... well, you can probably guess that, too – has pointed out that, if we do, there are no historic rules to fall back on: there’s no aviation equivalent of the WTO.

The claim that flights are going to just stop is definitely a worst case scenario: in practice, we can probably negotiate a bunch of new agreements. But we’re already negotiating a lot of other things, and we’re on a deadline, so we’re tight for time.

In fact, we’re really tight for time. Airlines for America has also argued that – because so many tickets are sold a year or more in advance – airlines really need a new deal in place by March 2018, if they’re to have faith they can keep flying. So it’s asking for aviation to be prioritised in negotiations.

The only problem is, we can’t negotiate anything else until the EU decides we’ve made enough progress on the divorce bill and the rights of EU nationals. And the clock’s ticking.

This is just remoaning. Brexit will set us free.

A little bit, maybe. CAA’s Haines has also said he believes “talk of significant retrenchment is very much over-stated, and Brexit offers potential opportunities in other areas”. Falling out of Europe means falling out of European ownership rules, so itcould bring foreign capital into the UK aviation industry (assuming anyone still wants to invest, of course). It would also mean more flexibility on “slot rules”, by which airports have to hand out landing times, and which are I gather a source of some contention at the moment.

But Haines also pointed out that the UK has been one of the most influential contributors to European aviation regulations: leaving the European system will mean we lose that influence. And let’s not forget that it was European law that gave passengers the right to redress when things go wrong: if you’ve ever had a refund after long delays, you’ve got the EU to thank.

So: the planes may not stop flying. But the UK will have less influence over the future of aviation; passengers might have fewer consumer rights; and while it’s not clear that Brexit will mean vastly fewer flights, it’s hard to see how it will mean more, so between that and the slide in sterling, prices are likely to rise, too.

It’s not that Brexit is inevitably going to mean disaster. It’s just that it’ll take a lot of effort for very little obvious reward. Which is becoming something of a theme.

Still, we’ll be free of those bureaucrats at the ECJ, won’t be?

This’ll be a great comfort when we’re all holidaying in Grimsby.

Jonn Elledge edits the New Statesman's sister site CityMetric, and writes for the NS about subjects including politics, history and Brexit. You can find him on Twitter or Facebook.